I really think we are as developers underusing setups like this. If you could somehow figure out a simple but effective sync between devices then that would be able to cover many use-cases.
Maybe we just need an sqlite with better support for replicas? Then people have one tiny server with a bunch of sqlite’s to which the apps can sync?
One major failing of WebDAV for these use cases is that the spec requires you to `PUT` the whole resource/file in order to save changes. This isn't too bad when the individual files are small, but as your single file apps grow, this means a lot of data transfer without the comforts of differential uploads.
I feel GitHub gists are a very good store for data: writable, versioned, shareable and read-only for non authors, workable, support for arbitrary data including binary
I tried that. The problem is that you will always need a middle-end (a separate server between your stand-alone front end application and the GitHub server). You can't just distribute a stand-alone app and let it talk to GitHub directly. Or well you can but only if you get a token with *FULL* scope for all repositories. What I as a developer need is a scope for only one repository. That's how stand-alone and especially browser-based applications can remain safe. You don't want to store tokens with full permissions in multiple apps.
They're the backend for Noteself, such I've been using for a few years now as my life organising note taking tool.
I have it setup self-hosted, and as long as I have internet I can connect to it and update it. Of I don't have internet I can browse the contents as per the most recently cached version.
(I can also save it to a single HTML file and back that up in numerous off site locations).
That would mean manual busywork every time you start/end a session. If you ever forget one of those steps, your work becomes out of sync and that’s extra work to sort it out. Depending on when you notice, it may take you several hours to fix. Not having to do things manually is what computers are for.
You could build a sync feature that requires some background process on each client along with likely complex configuration for peer-to-peer sharing, or you could build a web backend that runs on a server. There are good reasons why everyone does the latter.
> If you could somehow figure out a simple but effective sync between devices
If only there were a technology one could use to “serve” information from a central storage mechanism, then update this “server” in a deterministic fashion, possibly with security as part of the feature set…
Maybe we just need an sqlite with better support for replicas? Then people have one tiny server with a bunch of sqlite’s to which the apps can sync?